Convinced you’ve been wronged in a past life?
In a male-supremacist society, female power must logically appear illogical, mysterious, intimate, threatening.
Every day, the same, again
Treasury reimburses dog owner whose pet ate $500.
Eye contact may make people more resistant to persuasion.
New study finds that superstitions actually do “reverse” perceived bad fortune.
Altered wine chemical helps kill cancer.
Genetically Modified Bacteria Produce 50 Percent More Fuel.
Scientists have engineered “unjetlaggable” mice.
How one transportation business survived hurricane sandy.
The effect of diminished belief in free will.
Remember that crazy story about the dude in Mississippi who mailed ricin to Obama and then tried to frame some other dude in Mississippi for the crime? Well, the story is a thousand times crazier than you thought.
Many groups lack privilege, here in the discriminatory Babylon that is the USA. But who lacks privilege the most?
Guy gets ticketed for not riding in bike lane, makes video of himself smashing into things in bike lanes.
Ivanhoe Reservoir Covered With 400,000 Black Plastic Balls. [thanks quarqonia]
There is no lake in this photo, tilt your head to the right.
Master the art of making potions
{ giveitbackto.us | See also: US Government Shutdown: Good News For Patent Trolls }
Every day, the same, again
New York police search for parachutists who landed near Ground Zero.
A 111-year-old’s secret to a long life? 20 cigs a day and a pint of sherry for breakfast.
Neuroscientists have identified the location in the brain’s visual cortex responsible for generating a common perceptual illusion: Seeing shapes and surfaces that don’t really exist when viewing a fragmented background.
The Science of Why Girls Love flowers.
FDA approves portable artificial pancreas. The device syncs the results of a continuous reading of the wearer’s glucose levels with a pump that provides appropriate amounts of insulin.
China is known for its pirated DVDs and fake designer gear, but these criminals were producing something more intellectual: fake scholarly articles which they sold to academics, and counterfeit versions of existing medical journals in which they sold publication slots.
Peru exports more illegal gold than cocaine, and it’s the world’s biggest exporter of cocaine.
All you have to do is place your phone next to your keyboard to provide a direct channel for anyone to read what you are typing - and it’s all down to the vibration of the keys.
Internet reputation systems let individuals rate other individuals over the internet and provide recommendations based on those ratings. The Problem of Trust in the Sharing Economy
What if another universe
When a healthy person watches a smoothly moving object (say, an airplane crossing the sky), she tracks the plane with a smooth, continuous eye movement to match its displacement. This action is called smooth pursuit. But smooth pursuit isn’t smooth for most patients with schizophrenia. Their eyes often fall behind and they make a series of quick, tiny jerks to catch up or even dart ahead of their target. For the better part of a century, this movement pattern would remain a mystery. But in recent decades, scientific discoveries have lead to a better understanding of smooth pursuit eye movements.
The swancomb of the gondola, highreared, forges on through the murk, white and blue under a lighthouse
Sex and the City’s antepenultimate episode… […] This was the episode in which gauche, chain-smoking “Page Six” staple “Lexi Featherston” did some coke at a geriatric party, yelled, “This used to be the most exciting city in the world, and now it’s nothing but smoking near a fuckin’ open window,” and then took a header out said window. […]
Minimum estimates now put the number of New York City millionaires at around 400,000; there could be as many as 650,000. […] It’s a bedrock pillar of nickels and dimes all the way down, a billion fees a second, a burn rate, a waste, a dick joke, a $40,000 storefront in Brooklyn, one more year of fat bonus before you say you’ll finally quit, one more “space” disrupted, a Balthazar breakfast, a billion uniques, a whale, a Citation X, an acquisition, a bomb, a deposition, a bust.
Every day, the same, again
Walk-in vagina installed in Johannesburg women’s prison.
TomTato, a plant grows both tomatoes and potatoes.
Scientists create never-before-seen form of matter.
Sex 4 Days Per Week Will Raise Your Salary Up To 5%.
1/6 of US deaths from hospital errors.
Size, shape and color of wine glass affect how much you pour.
Medical experts have been powerless to stop the rise of antibiotic-resistant bacteria and are increasingly desperate to develop novel drugs. But a new study finds that smarter use of current antibiotics could offer a solution.
What if finding “The One” meant finding the person whose genome is most compatible with your own?
When presented with a baby, you’ve experienced a fleeting desire to eat it. Now science has an explanation. More: Cuteness Inspires Aggression. [both, thanks Tim]
Designs that borrow from biology are making robots flexible.
A new system called Sedasys, made by Johnson & Johnson, would automate the sedation of many patients undergoing colon-cancer screenings called colonoscopies. That could take anesthesiologists out of the room, eliminating a big source of income for the doctors.
How Google Converted Language Translation Into a Problem of Vector Space Mathematics.
“I personally wouldn’t invest in beachfront property anymore.”
Wealth in Africa Mapped Using Mobile Phone Data.
Errol Morris deconstructs the Zapruder Film.
Are people in the Central time zone more productive because TV schedules let them sleep more?
How a Social Media Guy Took an Underground Drug Market Viral.
A Mercedes sport utility vehicle stripped of its body panels and chassis sat on a platform like a cadaver on an autopsy table, components of its exhaust system arranged neatly on a cart for examination. GM engineers are tearing apart the competition. Literally.
Socotra Island in Yemen, The Most Alien-Looking Place on Earth. [more
Then did you, chivalrous Terence, hand forth, as to the manner born, that nectarous beverage
In 2005, Harry Frankfurt wrote a monograph entitled On Bullshit and this work received a flurry of attention. At its core, Frankfurt argues that while lying is a misrepresentation of the truth, bullshit is a misrepresentation of the self, and an indifference to truth, which in his mind is worse than lying. […]
Bullshit is more dangerous to democracy than lying. Unlike a lie, bullshit is destructive of even concern for the truth. Thus, in politics, it creates conditions where it is easier to present a lie as truth, and indifference to truth in public discourse renders public discourse impotent or worse. Even more destructively, it infects thinking. The corruption of language is bad enough, but even worse is the corruption of thinking. This is Plato’s insight into the problem with rhetoric, where the weaker argument can defeat the stronger.
The ‘non-’ in non-philosophy, of course, is not a negation
Who knew Martha Stewart had it in for patent trolls? The decorating queen’s media empire has filed a lawsuit to crush Lodsys, a shell company that claims the Martha Stewart Weddings iPad app infringes its patents.
In case you’re unfamiliar with Lodsys, the firm — which doesn’t make any products or do anything other than sue people — gained infamy two years ago by launching a wave of legal threats against small app makers, demanding they pay for using basic internet technology like in-app purchases or feedback surveys.
Many of the app companies, which are usually one or two-person operations, simply capitulate and agree to hand over a portion of their revenues rather than go up against Lodsys’ battery of lawyers and a Texas jury. But not Martha.
In a complaint filed this week in federal court in Wisconsin, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia asked a judge to declare that four magazine iPad apps are not infringing Lodsys’ patents, and that the patents are invalid because the so-called inventions are not new.The complaint explained how Lodsys invited the company to “take advantage of our program” by buying licenses at $5,000 apiece. It also calls the Wisconsin court’s attention to Lodsys’ involvement in more than 150 Texas lawsuits.
In choosing to sue Lodsys and hopefully crush its patents, Martha Stewart is choosing a far more expensive option than simply paying Lodsys to go away. The good news is that the decorating maven has some unlikely allies in the campaign: tech rivals Google and Apple are also lining up against Lodsys in an effort to protect the app developers, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation this week filed an anti-Lodsys brief of its own.
photo { Diane Arbus, Woman on the Street With Two Men, NYC, 1956 }
Think you’re escaping and run into yourself
Animals living in marine environments keep to their schedules with the aid of multiple independent—and, in at least some cases, interacting—internal clocks. […] Multiple clocks—not just the familiar, 24-hour circadian clock—might even be standard operating equipment in animals.
photo { Thomas Prior }
Figure out what advice I should have given you, and do that instead
The study was published in the journal PNAS, and asks the questions:
How did human societies evolve from small groups, integrated by face-to-face cooperation, to huge anonymous societies of today, typically organized as states? Why is there so much variation in the ability of different human populations to construct viable states? […]
An empire is only as strong as its people are altruistic towards each other. Essentially, the more they can act collectively, the stronger they can become. […] Turchin et al. argue that altruism appeared for one simple reason: warfare. […] Societies that have more collective solidarity can more easily conquer others and are less likely to be conquered themselves. This allows more altruistic cultures to spread.
The mirror of the will has appeared to it in the world as representation
Subjective experience of time is just that—subjective. Even individual people, who can compare notes by talking to one another, cannot know for certain that their own experience coincides with that of others. But an objective measure which probably correlates with subjective experience does exist. It is called the critical flicker-fusion frequency, or CFF, and it is the lowest frequency at which a flickering light appears to be a constant source of illumination. It measures, in other words, how fast an animal’s eyes can refresh an image and thus process information.
For people, the average CFF is 60 hertz (ie, 60 times a second). This is why the refresh-rate on a television screen is usually set at that value. Dogs have a CFF of 80Hz, which is probably why they do not seem to like watching television. To a dog a TV programme looks like a series of rapidly changing stills.
Having the highest possible CFF would carry biological advantages, because it would allow faster reaction to threats and opportunities. Flies, which have a CFF of 250Hz, are notoriously difficult to swat. A rolled up newspaper that seems to a human to be moving rapidly appears to them to be travelling through treacle.
photo { Paul Andrews }
Looks horrid open. Then the insides decompose quickly.
Lying well is hard — but not in the way you might think.
We usually look for nervousness as one of the signs of lying. Like the person is worried about getting caught. But that’s actually a weak predictor.
Some people are so confident they don’t fear getting caught. Others are great at hiding it.
Some get nervous when questioned so you get false positives. And others are lying to themselves — so they show no signs of deliberate deception.
So lying isn’t necessarily hard in terms of stress. But it is hard in terms of “cognitive load.” What’s that mean?
Lying is hard because it makes you think. You need to think up the lies. That’s extra work.
Looking for nervousness can be a wild goose chase. Looking for signs of thinking hard can be a great strategy.
[…]
They tend not to move their arms and legs so much, cut down on gesturing, repeat the same phrases, give shorter and less detailed answers, take longer before they start to answer, and pause and hesitate more. In addition, there is also evidence that they distance themselves from the lie, causing their language to become more impersonal. As a result, liars often reduce the number of times that they say words such as “I,” “me,” and “mine,” and use “him” and “her” rather than people’s names. Finally, is increased evasiveness, as liars tend to avoid answering the question completely, perhaps by switching topics or by asking a question of their own.
To detect deception, forget about looking for signs of tension, nervousness, and anxiety. Instead, a liar is likely to look as though they are thinking hard for no good reason, conversing in a strangely impersonal tone, and incorporating an evasiveness that would make even a politician or a used-car salesman blush.
Ten grand and you can have the body
Hyperlink cinema uses cinematic devices such as flashbacks, interspersing scenes out of chronological order, split screens and voiceovers to create an interacting social network of storylines and characters across space and time. […]
Krems and Dunbar wondered if the social group sizes and properties of social networks in such films differ vastly from the real world or classic fiction. They set out to see if the films can side-step the natural cognitive constraints that limit the number and quality of social relationships people can generally manage. Previous studies showed for instance that conversation groups of more than four people easily fizzle out. Also, Dunbar and other researchers found that someone can only maintain a social network of a maximum of 150 people, which is further layered into 4 to 5 people (support group), 12 to 15 people (sympathy group), and 30 to 50 people (affinity group).
Twelve hyperlink films and ten female interest conventional films as well as examples from the real world and classical fiction were therefore analyzed. Krems and Dunbar discovered that all examples rarely differed and all followed the same general social patterns found in the conventional face-to-face world. Hyperlink films had on average 31.4 characters that were important for the development of plot, resembling the size of an affinity group in contemporary society. Their cast lists also featured much the same number of speaking characters as a Shakespeare play (27.8 characters), which reflects a broader, less intimate sphere of action. Female interest films had 20 relevant characters on average, which corresponds with the sympathy group size and mimics female social networks in real life.
Every day, the same, again
Man’s Penis Amputated After “Enthusiastic” Viagra Overdose.
Study suggests men succumb to sexual temptations more than women — for example, cheating on a partner — because they experience strong sexual impulses, not because they have weak self-control.
Why parents think your partner isn’t good enough.
Most of what we perceive as flavor is not mouth-derived but actually due to your sense of smell.
Blood Sugar Linked to Dementia.
Vaccines: what is the meaning of phase I, II and III?
The big money has moved from developing psychiatric drugs to manipulating our brain networks.
Facebook Launches Advanced AI Effort to Find Meaning in Your Posts.
We compare the productivity of Fields medalists (winners of the top mathematics prize) to that of similarly brilliant contenders. The two groups have similar publication rates until the award year, after which the winners’ productivity declines. [PDF]
The case of the disappearing teaspoons: 70 discreetly numbered teaspoons placed in tearooms around the institute and observed weekly over five months. 56 of the 70 teaspoons disappeared during the study. The rate of loss was not influenced by the teaspoons’ value.
How to Design a City for Women.
China just bought 5% of Ukraine.
There are now half a million people over 100, and the number is growing at 7 per cent a year. Why are there so few people over 115 years of age?
The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity.
Placenta prints, live tweeting labor: Pregnancy trends gone too far?
Like the chocolate of Vavey, in the sun they’ll melt away
From biology class to “C.S.I.,” we are told again and again that our genome is at the heart of our identity. Read the sequences in the chromosomes of a single cell, and learn everything about a person’s genetic information.
But scientists are discovering that […] it’s quite common for an individual to have multiple genomes. Some people, for example, have groups of cells with mutations that are not found in the rest of the body. Some have genomes that came from other people. […]
In 1953, a British woman donated a pint of blood. It turned out that some of her blood was Type O and some was Type A. The scientists who studied her concluded that she had acquired some of her blood from her twin brother in the womb, including his genomes in his blood cells.
Chimerism, as such conditions came to be known, seemed for many years to be a rarity. But “it can be commoner than we realized,” said Dr. Linda Randolph, a pediatrician at Children’s Hospital in Los Angeles.
Twins can end up with a mixed supply of blood when they get nutrients in the womb through the same set of blood vessels. In other cases, two fertilized eggs may fuse together. […] Women can also gain genomes from their children. After a baby is born, it may leave some fetal cells behind in its mother’s body, where they can travel to different organs and be absorbed into those tissues. […] In 2012, Canadian scientists performed autopsies on the brains of 59 women. They found neurons with Y chromosomes in 63 percent of them. The neurons likely developed from cells originating in their sons. […]
Medical researchers aren’t the only scientists interested in our multitudes of personal genomes. […] Last year, for example, forensic scientists at the Washington State Patrol Crime Laboratory Division described how a saliva sample and a sperm sample from the same suspect in a sexual assault case didn’t match.
I could ask her perhaps about how to pronounce that voglio
First Genetic Evidence That Humans Choose Friends With Similar DNA
The discovery that friends are as genetically similar as fourth cousins has huge implications for our understanding of human evolution, say biologists.
Potions of green tea endow them during their brief existence with natural pincushions of quite colossal blubber
A team of scientists in the UK claims they’ve found evidence for alien life coming to Earth. According to their paper, published in the Journal of Cosmology (more on that in a moment) they lofted a balloon to a height of 22-27 kilometers (13-17 miles). When they retrieved it, they found a single particle that appears to be part of a diatom, a microscopic plant. This, they claim, is evidence of life coming from space. […]
The team publishing this paper includes […] a man who has claimed, time and again, to have found diatoms in meteorites. However, his previous claims have been less than convincing: The methodology was sloppy, the conclusions were not at all supported by the evidence, and heck, he hadn’t even established that the rocks they found were in fact meteorites. He also has a history of seeing life from space everywhere based on pretty thin evidence.
Moreover, this team published their results in the Journal of Cosmology, an online journal that doesn’t have the most discerning track record with science.
So that gesture, not music, not odours, would be a universal language
Physicists have discovered a jewel-like geometric object that dramatically simplifies calculations of particle interactions and challenges the notion that space and time are fundamental components of reality.
The new geometric version of quantum field theory could also facilitate the search for a theory of quantum gravity that would seamlessly connect the large- and small-scale pictures of the universe.
